Every business has those crucial but repetitive and time-consuming tasks to complete. However, many of these tasks are not necessarily income-producing activities or the best use of your employees’ time. For most businesses, time is money. Automating operations will not only help your business to save time and money, it will also allow you to better control costs and plan for substantial growth.

But where do you begin?

Here are our 5 tips to get you started with business process automation (BPA):

1. Easy wins: Automate the repetitive tasks first

What are your pain points of doing day-to-day business? What are your most labour-intensive tasks? When it comes to automating your business, it’s wise to identify the grunt work or rote duties that could be done more efficiently. Choose to automate those repetitive tasks that can eliminate human error and save your business time and money.

2. Breed a culture of automation

For businesses who want to remain nimble and flexible, constantly looking for ways to automate your processes will allow you to be more efficient. It’s also important to encourage and generate a culture of automation within your business if you want employees to adopt this mentality. Openly discuss the benefits of automating business processes with your staff members and how it will help them to learn more and grow into more senior roles. Workers who automate the most tend to be highly efficient and productive. Why wouldn’t you want to breed a culture of automation in your business?

3. Simplify processes through automation

When you automate you’re often forced to look at your business as a series of interlinked processes and systems. By viewing your business in this way, you’ll be amazed how many processes can be removed completely, simplifying the way you work. Streamlining your processes will help you to identify new opportunities to improve your business and it may even prompt you to develop new products or services.

4. Empower your whole business with a knowledge base

A knowledge base is a centralised source of information such as a library or database housed in your intranet. As programmers, we often use software to manage our knowledge base which holds information required for our business processes and functions.

As you solve problems and develop new systems in your business, the knowledge base is a great way to store material that helps to solve a common business problem, such as instructional data, and allows for more efficient business processes.

By storing steps and instructions for common business processes in your knowledge base, it will allow you to boost productivity, make faster decisions and encourage collaboration among your employees. Solutions to recurring problems can be documented in a knowledge base and be used as a future reference point if that same problem is encountered.

5. Learn from the experts

Look to leaders in your sector for advice or mentoring on business automation. Can you reach out to them for a chat or can you adopt some of their tactics to reduce processes in your own business?

Alternatively, you could find a strategic partner who can assist with implementing the right data strategy to ensure you’re on the right track when it comes to managing technical risk and executing a long-term software development plan. A good supplier will be able to provide guarantees on their work and will be available for long-term support contracts to give you peace of mind.

Find the perfect partner to implement business automation

At inoutput, we combine technology and process to help you automate all facets of your business. We create clever software to automate time-consuming and repetitive tasks, freeing up time for you to focus on running your business and making a profit. We can advise which tools and applications will work best to automate your business.

Are you ready to unlock the full potential of your organisation? Find out how tailored business process automation can work for you. Call (03) 9016 3066 or fill in our enquiry form.